skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main problem with PHP 5 was never the lack of features, but things like "there is no way I can get an error code from fopen()", and things like that. Can I now get EEXISTS and such out of fopen()? Looking at the docs it still just returns false and emits an uncatchable E_WARNING that can't be examined programmatically.

Having to write a bit more code because it doesn't have some feature is not ideal, but whatever. Not able to correctly race-free implement file access is a much bigger issue. I have some other gripes (which may or may not be fixed), but this was and remains my main one.
Don't lie to us. We all know it can't be true!!1!
Of course the goal for the lawyers then is different, it's just extracting money instead of preventing distribution
You're mainly correct, but if you have a look at busy times in a bike-oriented city such as Copenhagen then there are big queues of bikes/trikes at traffic lights. Maybe "paused in traffic" would be a better description of them though.
Or you pay 5 Dollars a month for some good old shared hosting, upload you php files and be done with it. Save big money not even having to worry about all the DevOps stuff.

PHP is amazing for small and medium sized companies that just need to get stuff done.
I think this advice is backwards, as is the problem. I’d trust an accountant’s mind or a builder’s eye if I knew that they are acting from experience. But you don’t wanna trust someone who believes in-their-head is superior or reliable and makes you good.

The core idea is no, calculating in your head doesn’t turn you into a pro. Being a pro makes calculating in your head safe enough to rely on until you get to your desk and double-check.

That said, I was an integrator half my life and seen some accountants, big and small. Everyone used a calculator, it’s right next to their mouse and there’s another one elsewhere. And no one ever tried to talk about numbers afk, except for ballparks. Most of the times they suggest to go and query a db together. I find it very professional.
> ..and PHP still kinda sucked

Can you elaborate?
Every argument like this that just focuses on the language features and performance completely misses the point.

When I hear people expressing that PHP "sucks", that's mostly coupled to the ecosystem, not necessarily the language itself. Yes, the biggest warts in the language might be non-issues now if you write 100% of your code yourself, but the ecosystem is the same as it ever was.

PHPs utilitarianism is its biggest strength but also its biggest weakness when it comes to its libraries. Packagist is mostly a graveyard of libraries that people have coded up for their exact niche use-case 8 years ago (with no updates since), with little flexiblity beyond that (like you would see for libraries in other ecosystems).

The popular frameworks (mainly the CMSs, but also some of the MVC ones) suffer from a similar fate: Great if you want to hack something up quickly or do a small extension to it, but full of footguns and lacking in developer tooling.
I'm one of those people. The convenience of having it readily accessible in the task bar at any point is definitely worth the $0.99 for me. Whether I'm in Figma, Sublime Text, VS Code, or Google Chrome, I can get different lengths of Lorem Ipsum in just 2 clicks with no search or loading time.
this article ostentatiously hails from the Dan Brown school of unnecessary adverbs
I did years of martial arts training, including the board breaking stuff. Then I made the mistake of stepping into the ring to spar with a boxer half my weight. He wiped the floor with me, using only one hand.

Yes, "martial arts" is a fun way to get some exercise and build a little confidence, but never make the mistake of thinking that you actually know how to fight.

There's an entire universe of difference between someone who takes martial arts classes a few times a week, and an actual trained fighter. I trained in boxing for a few years, and got to the point where I can trivially defeat an untrained fighter who's bigger than me, and easily defeat a less experienced fighter. But even then, against a professional fighter who trains all day every day, I'd never stand a chance. I once watched in disbelief as my coach defeated our star pupil (who was getting too big for his britches) with BOTH hands behind his back (basically just dodged and smashed him with his shoulder until he fell down). You simply could not hit him or even touch him, while he could pick any spot he wanted on you.

Fighting, like any skill, takes a long time to master. And there are no "mystical" routes or special ways or short cuts. Only hard work and regular practice in real combat.
Whether or not this is the case, an ad hominem attack against the race of the authors and a strawman that presents their method as a cake recipe only convinces me about the reviewer being an asshole. One could turn the proof of the Pythagorean theorem into a cake recipe in a way that makes it sound ridiculous and unscientific.
Why go so fast that you can't stop in the distance you can see to be clear? That's just poor driving.
It doesn't (always). It depends on where the other planets are, and can range from near the center of the sun to outside its surface.
> Someone could throw together a “PHPython” from existing components and get the same effect.

Python has been around for like 30 years, why isn't that quite the case?

I guess there was mod_python but nobody cared enough: https://modpython.org/

I guess there's now mod_wsgi which is similar to PHP-FPM in some ways: https://modwsgi.readthedocs.io/en/develop/

Yet, even with the actual deployment not being much different (just used Apache as an example here), there's still dependency management, which Python is often described to be pretty messy at, virtual environments or not. With PHP, most of the stuff you need for common use cases often is pre-installed and is just a matter of enabling some plugin in the config.

That said, I deploy most of my stuff in containers, so PHP, Python, Node, .NET, Java and others all become more alike when viewed from the outside.
It's definitely possible to inject malicious code that humans don't spot, there was a whole competition dedicated to humans doing this in C well before LLMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest

Now I'm wondering, can you put in a comment which the LLM will pay attention to such that it generates subtle back-doors? And can this comment be such that humans looking at the code don't realise this behaviour will be due to the comment?
I assume Red Lobster preemptively lowered the food grade and the service labour costs to avoid raising the prices in their menu drastically. We've had a wave of very strong inflation pretty much worldwide - or at least wherever there have been covid lock-downs and huge government payment schemes - and for many businesses, especially those that already operated at the margin of profitability, this has been their death knell.

I'm not so sure that Red Lobster would have survived if instead of lowering the quality of the product they'd have just raised the prices by say 80% overnight. I mention 80% because that's how much many hospitality businesses have raised prices in my area in London since the pandemic.

I've seen businesses go bust here that have tried both things:

- lowering quality and raising the prices by less than the average

- maintaining roughly the same quality and service but raising prices drastically

Plenty of examples in my area of businesses just collapsing with either strategy. People simply would not accept the new prices in many cases.

A business that is sort-of a luxury business like those specialised in oysters, shellfish in general, high-end cuisine etc only a very select few have survived. Those that are large chains have suffered the most, because they are not seen as so much of a special expenditure and people would just stop going.

Red Lobster perhaps would have fared better by not reacting and simply raising prices. Who knows, it's easy to make the counterfactual scenario in the abstract.
What do you use now instead?
How WASD became the standard PC control scheme (2016)
Why would you use PHP when Python exists?
Many other frameworks copied this approach from PHP.

For example, both ASP and ASP.NET can be developed using Notepad.exe directly on an IIS web server, and you can similarly test changes by simply refreshing your browser.

Personally I'm allergic to this style of development, the "banging on it with a rock until it starts moving" approach tends to result in poor outcomes over the long term.

I much prefer that a compiler go over the entire codebase and check everything when I hit the compile button.

Sadly, this bad habit from PHP still lingers in ASP.NET Core to this day, and causes me endless grief.

Just over the last couple of months, I have encountered the following:

- DEV, UAT, and PRD are out-of-sync with each other and the source code. When I asked the developers why that is, they said they make changes to individual files instead of "building the whole thing", because "that's faster". Okay, they saved the two minutes the pipeline takes to run, great. Now I have to spend a week disentangling the mess.

- I refactor something, hit build, it comes back with all green ticks, I deploy... and the site is broken with HTTP/500 a day later because these scripting-style frameworks don't build the page code until runtime.

- A security vulnerability code scanner was enabled, and it broke the build. Why? Because it actually builds the code, all of it! Except that these frameworks have two sets of page template files that contribute to the "final product": 1) the list of page templates registered with the build system or VS project file, and 2) the list of files physically in the Git repo. Some build steps consider only the former, the web server considers the latter. You can remove a page from a build system, and it'll remain working. It's like removing C code from Linux and still have it turn up in the kernel! That's nuts, and a security nightmare. Cough-xv-cough.

PS: It's possible for ASP.NET Core to be configured to both compile every page on publish and support hot-reload and automatically include every file in the build if it's physically in the folder structure. This really ought to be the default, but isn't... to pander to ex-PHP devs or something.
You can't build a good house with bad foundations.
Likely $TSLA investors present in HN crowd.
One of the issues I have with "languages that don't suck anymore" is that, even after the language gets all the cool new features, you'll still end up having to use some libraries targeting old versions.

So you end up having to choose between stable libraries in the old style or experimental modern libraries.

While some features can be retrofitted to work with old code (e.g. Java 8's SAMs were smart a way for old libraries to support the new lambdas), in a lot of situations you'll have to wait years for the stable libraries to support the new features.

Having said that, it's nice to see PHP catching up. I haven't used it in a long time, but I like to check the changelog once in a while.
Previous job: "We need some more real & complex test code for that compiler, but it doesn't support all language features" - "okay, Linux is too huge, we already did a few real life libs like compression, encryption and sqlite... I'll port ioquake3 to it". I had to resort to GCC for some parts that could not be ported without disproportionate effort (graphics code iirc?); but once it built, it ran without error and I could play a few matches. At least that's what nostalgia tells me ;-)
> You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience.

No, today it is a lathe, tomorrow is capucino, the day after tomorrow is shit. See the evolution of GUI in Windows and Android.
Coin flip stands for 50/50 that would indicate good and bad resume. A random rating of 1 to 10 would already unlikely deliver any useful results.

Didn’t read the article.
Oh but if your web server had PHP installed, it really was “easy” in a way that modern web programming is not. Yes, you could replicate it with Python, but actually you can’t, because no one has “thrown together” a PHPython. Nothing today can beat the feeling of being able to just drop a .php file in a directory and have an interactive, dynamic web page up and running
This is a more dramatic version but less accurate. The better take is on:
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/nvidias-aborted-nv2-chip-a...

1. Sega knew earlier that triangle architecture made more sense, but NVIDIA did not comply. Sega had already distanced itself from NVIDIA but could not kill the deal.

2. NV2 never worked. NVIDIA also realised it was going the wrong path. It came back to Sega and decided to kill the deal mutually.

3. Jensen picked a better leader, David Kirk, and focused on NV3, also known as RIVA128.
Comments from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965143

PS: The Smith and the Devil (claimed to be 6K yo) is well knows in Basque culture, there's a pretty fun movie from 2017: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5592878/
Because this method of deployment is not only unsafe but also doesn't scale.

In the age of cloud, you just run your web application as its own server, and just have a proxy that fronts it.
Not just modern consoles. Nintendo has had ‘security’ hardware built in since the NES (the CIC chip)
> Oldest Palestinian dynasties are from around 18th century.

Most of the ancestors of the Palestinians have lived in the region for as long as anyone can trace. The average Palestinian Arab is much more closely related to ancient Levantine people than the average Israeli Jew. Not that this should matter: what matters is that the foundation of the state of Israel required the mass expulsion of the native population, which was nearly 100% Arab.

> Jews started coming back to Israel en-mass in the 19th century, well before the British arrived.

There were small numbers of Jewish colonists who arrived in the late 19th Century, but they were still only a single-digit percentage of the population when the British took over.

>> which was almost 100% Arab

> This is very false. If it was true Israel would have lost its independence war

When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the vast majority of its Jewish population had recently immigrated to Palestine. Just a few decades earlier, when the Zionist movement was founded, the native population of Palestine was nearly 100% Arab.

> violence and intimidation towards Jews on campus

This whole narrative about antisemitism on American campuses is completely fabricated. A fairly large share of the pro-Palestinian protesters are Jewish. They may even be the single largest ethnic group represented among the protesters. Columbia is a liberal campus in the middle of New York City, the city with the largest Jewish community in the world. The idea that Columbia is a den of antisemitism is particularly absurd.
Sounds complicated. Any recommendations for existing libraries I can use to handle this?
Meh, as far as I can see PHP has a ton of very active development around web services and frameworks, which is its core value proposition. PHP as a language should probably slow down in general but the people who use it don't seem to be really dying out or slowing down as much as the bubble leads us to believe.
> it's my recollection that the legal usage in English law is "in the matter of"

This is a tangent, but in Latin that "of" is not included in the re; it would have to be marked on whatever noun is governed by the "of" in English. Including the "of" makes the English translation better, but slightly less literal - in the most technical possible sense, the "of" is implied rather than explicit.

In English it's easy to indicate that some word or phrase requires an argument marked with "of" by just including the "of" when you cite the word/phrase. In Latin this can't be done. A dictionary (aimed at modern students) would say something like "res +gen" to note that an expression requires an argument in the genitive case. I don't know how Latin speakers would have described this, but the need must surely have come up.

Tying back to my earlier observation, it might interest you to know that the word "of" is derived from "off". The reason is kind of funny: off is a (correct!) translation of the Latin preposition de. de doesn't mean "of", but it does mean "off". Latin has no preposition for "of".

However, in Romance, the case system of Latin was lost, and de was repurposed into a genitive marker. That's why it means "of" today in Spanish, French, etc. I assume this had already happened by the time English translated it as "off", and that's why the genitive particle "of" developed, but I don't know for sure.
You can build a resistant house on seismic ground. (I know you're being metaphoric)
> Packagist is mostly a graveyard of libraries that people have coded up for their exact niche use-case 8 years ago (with no updates since), with little flexiblity beyond that (like you would see for libraries in other ecosystems).

Could you provide some examples? I wrote a lot of PHP libraries over the years, and while some are definitely stale because nobody uses them (and thus I have no incentive to keep the lights on), the only time I see dead packages, they're actually forks of other open source software that people contributed exactly one commit to (to change the package name).
I’d argue that it does natively support MultiByte strings, albeit with an extension library that’s part of the language.

Even your supplied link states they’re not supported at a “low level”, but states nothing about “native”.
Let me share a secret with you: PHP runs just like a python script.
Any insight here on the scale? I like Flutter; hope they are not killing it.
The modern bicycle is the pinnacle of personal transport technology. It's yet to be surpassed. Unfortunately unbridled consumption of fossil fuels has made cars economical enough that you can't cycle anywhere any more. I heard people are getting into gravel biking now because the road is too unpleasant.

I maintain a small but shrinking amount of hope that we might be able to get rid of cars. Sometimes I think it's getting better, but then I remember how much had already been ceded to them in just my lifetime. Maybe when I'm old it will be possible to cycle around safely and young people will know true freedom.

Repairing bicycles is part of that freedom really. You don't a lot of space or super expensive tools. There's no toxic liquids to deal with. I rebuilt a bike from the frame up around 2006 without any help from YouTube. I realised later I did a lot of it wrong as I was essentially guessing, but I still rode it for many hundreds of miles.
> A lot of it is essentially dance and performance.

The "dance and performance" (kata?) is essentially slow-motion practice of moves and responses. You are muscle-memorizing moves that you would deploy at full speed in a non-pratice scenario. It certainly looks like dance, and it feels a bit like dance too.

Because it's slowed-down continuous motion, you have to concentrate on keeping your balance. When that's translated to a non-practice scenario, it results in greater precision both in terms of motion and of force-delivery. Performing katas also develops strength; I gave up tai-chi because after every class, my whole body would ache.
I may remember more than 4096 tokens, but I probably only pay attention to 7 of them at any given moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
This article focuses on added features, but although some of them may help, those features weren’t really the problem with PHP. I haven’t meaningfully used PHP since about 2010, but https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ generally rang true, and I get the impression that most of that is still valid (though some points have certainly been fixed).
> This seems to completely disregard the existence of help screens, exploration, and (to some degree) documentation.

Looking at Windows settings: help screens - link to some article on internet, exploration - i really don't have time to learn every version of Settings, documentation - good luck with that.
I used PHP again last year after almost a decade and it sucks less (a lot less!), but it still sucks.

Going from a language with a well organised stdlib with consistent syntax to php is not fun.

Sure, it has a lot of nice features now, and some of the footguns have been removed, but the core language is still there and it's still a mishmash with a bunch of hidden landmines.
That's a fun prompt. Depends on the landlord but taking a Chris Voss approach here:

"Honestly, I'm worried I can't afford to move, you're a smart guy, I bet you're worried about that too. I get it, I don't want to be 'that' tenant." (label the negative emotion, empathize)

"How am I supposed to move so soon? It'd cost me $1500 and I can barely even afford the rent." (Anchor a price, turn it into problem solving)

"This is probably going to sound unreasonable, but could you help me with the move? That way I can be sure to be out on time." (Calibrated question to guide the conversation)
Anyone claiming such things doesn't understand Unicode at all.

The whole concept of having special Unicode-aware strlen or substr is nonsense.
Wrenching on a motorcycle is similarly rewarding/zen. A little more complex than a bicycle and sometimes requiring some more specialist tools but otherwise pretty much the same thing.

Especially older, carbureted motorcycles with minimal electronics. You can often work everything out and get them going like new again with just some elbow grease and replacing perishables like fluids, seals, gaskets, etc.

Not to mention it's fun riding a bike that previously didn't even kick over before it came into your hands.
Post-inflation labour cost most likely. The clutch will be a small fraction of that.
"consciousness" is often an alias for soul with a scientific flavor. That's why "machines cannot be conscious" despite the fact that humans obey to the same physical rules.

Once you define consciousness it might be easy to implement. If I use the definition "perception of our own thoughts" it's already implemented with ps or activity monitor. The mystery is how this is done biologically and how evolution had led to it. But the implementation with computers is trivial.
“メカ” refers to any mechanical design. The artists who do “mecha” design in anime will do everything from guns to boats. The English term’s meaning changed when it was re-borrowed.
> They just didn't know what a gateway, NAT, or subnet is.

If you ask me, they shouldn't have to, in the same way that you probably don't know how to diagnose a coax cable problem.

The major public clouds all have completely software-defined networks (SDNs), and concepts like subnets are basically emulated for the sake of legacy systems.

Why would we want subnets, like... at all? Why can't all systems just have an IP address and use point-to-point communications? That's literally what the underlying SDN does with the packets anyway! The subnets and routes you see don't map 1:1 to the underlying network. The packets are stuffed inside a VXLAN packet and routed between random hypervisors scattered randomly across multiple buildings. Just give up the pretence, give everything an system-assigned public-routable IPv6 address and be done with it. Better yet, auto-register everything in a private DNS zone and auto-generate internal use SSL certs too.

The amount of wiring we do manually is just insane, just so that Azure and Amazon can help greybeards pretend that they're operating a Cisco router and need to stand in line to file the paperwork required to get an SSL certificate.
PHP comes with all nuts and bolts included.

It’s just me, my text editor and an FTP client.